Monday, July 11, 2005

BRC 5: City Hippy: Shopping for Sustainable Furniture

City Hippy is dedicated to exploring how to live a greener and more ethical life. We cover a variety of topics to help you become a greener and more ethical person. City Hippy is produced by a global collective of writers.

We are buying a house and need appliances and furniture. Keyword: Cheap! Result? Ikea! ARGH! so uninspired by Ikea...nice ethical ethos but your products are the furniture equivalents of Volvo's from the 80's! Sadly cheap appliances often means less ethical and energy efficient and cheap furniture generally equals uninspiring and forest murder. Of course the perfect thing to do would be to get second-hand stuff! But the choice seems limited and poor. We figured that for a couple of hundred pounds more and with research here or here we could have our cake and eat it too. As luck would have it we were checking out the area we are moving to and stumbled across a shop called GIFT (Goods Imported & Fairly Traded). Their website is under construction @ www.gift-fairtrade.com but you can call them on +44 (0) 1462 483370 (tell Fiona that City Hippy sent you). They have lovely furniture, gifts, ornaments and clothing...and it all seems to be fairly-traded and sustainably produced. Hurrah! It means spending more money than we budgeted for (thanks VISA) but we can really feel the love from those bed-side tables and our food will taste sweeter served at our new gorgeous green and fair table! We can feel the love! We hope you can too!